California 1099 filing requirements

California is the easy one, and unusually so. The Franchise Tax Board accepts the IRS's Combined Federal/State Filing program as satisfying the state requirement outright, with no withholding carve-out, which is not how most participating states treat it.

The trigger for a California obligation is residency or source, not withholding: you need to file an information return with the state if the recipient is a California resident or part-year resident, or the source of the transaction was in California.

The short version

Is a state filing required?

Only where your federal and state figures differ. The FTB says that if you have an exception requiring you to report something differently for federal and state purposes, such as a different dollar amount, you file separately with the IRS and with the FTB.

Does CF/SF satisfy the state?

Yes, fully. The FTB repeats it: if you are a CF/SF filer, you do not send your file to California. The IRS forwards it as part of the program agreement.

Due dates to the state

February 28 on paper, March 31 electronically, for both 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC. The recipient copy is due January 31, and February 15 for the attorney gross-proceeds row.

Reconciliation form

None. The FTB does not require the IRS Form 1096 transmittal.

Electronic-filing threshold

Ten or more information returns must be filed electronically using Secure Web Internet File Transfer (SWIFT). Nine or fewer may go on paper to the address the FTB publishes.

Dollar threshold

Matches federal, and the FTB publishes both years: $600 or more for tax year 2025, $2,000 or more for tax year 2026.

File format

Fixed-length text per IRS Publication 1220, with a short list of California-specific supplemental fields. PDF, CSV and XML are not accepted.

What this means in practice

If your figures are identical federally and for California (which they usually are), the correct California action is to do nothing, and to be able to show why. The FTB says so in two places on the same page, including once under its list of top electronic filing errors, which tells you what it spends its time correcting.

Where the two do diverge, the state filing is a real one: the ten-return threshold and SWIFT apply, the file is a Publication 1220 fixed-length text file, and the FTB documents its own additions to the layout (a surname indicator on the payer record, a non-California return indicator on the payee record, and a state-withholding control total). The K record, it notes, is only supplied to the IRS on a CF/SF file and should be omitted when filing directly.

Extensions and waivers each have a form: FTB 6274 requests a waiver from filing information returns, FTB 6274A requests an extension, and the FTB allows a 30-day extension for these form types.

Why California appears here at all

We wrote these nine guides because they are the states our customers' clients actually live and work in. Where a state's rule is unresolved on the state's own published pages, this article says so rather than picking an answer.